Although global declines in structure have been documented in the aging human brain, little is known about the functional integrity of the striatum and prefrontal cortex in older adults during incentive processing. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine whether younger and older adults differed in both self-reported and neural responsiveness to anticipated mone...

Medicare is considering an expansion of the bundle of dialysis-related services to be paid on a prospective basis. Exploratory models were developed to assess the potential limitations of case-mix adjustment for such an expansion. A broad set of patient characteristics explained 11.8% of the variation in Medicare allowable charges per dialysis session. Although adding recent hematocrit values o...

T paper analyzes optimal selling strategies of a monopolist facing forward-looking patient unit-demand bidders in a sequential auction market. Such a seller faces a fundamental choice between two selling regimes: adaptive selling that involves learning about remaining demand from early prices, and commitment selling that forgoes such learning and makes all selling decisions in the beginning of ...

Cap and trade (CAT) results in lower abatement costs relative to command and control, but might increase industry marginal abatement cost, resulting in higher equilibrium emissions. With lumpy investment, command and control leads to multiple investment equilibria and “regulatory uncertainty”. CAT, a first best policy, eliminates this uncertainty. Command and control policies cause firms to imi...

This paper assesses the e¢ciency of store characteristics in the supermarket industry using a model of store choice estimated with a consumer survey and a dataset of store characteristics. We measure the private gains to ...rms, and external impacts, of a series of counterfactual changes to store characteristics. The existing stores most pro...table to their ...rms are smaller and reduce consum...

Recent evidence shows that the returns to labor and the skill premium both increase in developing countries after trade liberalization, despite the low skill content of their exports. The author explains this apparent puzzle by arguing that trade increases technology transfers from industrial to developing countries and that the transfer technology is biased in favor of skilled labor. The relat...

We examined age differences in temporal discounting, the tendency to devalue delayed outcomes relative to immediate ones, with particular emphasis on the role of affective responses. A life-span sample completed an incentive-compatible temporal discounting task involving both monetary gains and losses. Covariates included demographic characteristics, cognitive functioning, personality traits, a...

Weight change over a 1-year period was examined in a highly homogeneous group of 78,694 women ages 50-69 enrolled in a prospective mortality study. Artificial sweetener usage increased with relative weight and decreased with age. Users were significantly more likely than nonusers to gain weight, regardless of initial weight. Average weight gains or losses by artificial sweetener users differed ...

Visuospatial competencies are related to performance in mathematical domains in adulthood, but are not consistently related to mathematics achievement in children. We confirmed the latter for first graders and demonstrated that children who show above average first-to-fifth grade gains in visuospatial memory have an advantage over other children in mathematics. The study involved the assessment...

PURPOSE To determine which version of the Visual Function Index-14 (VF-14) most precisely measured cataract surgery outcomes, rescale the VF-14 using Rasch analysis, and create a short-form version for comparison. SETTING Flinders Medical Centre, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. METHODS In this cohort study incorporating questionnaire development, participants were drawn from the catar...